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Nothing fine about jailing poor people

By Staff | Sep 27, 2015

One of the flaws of our legal system is that the justice a person receives is too often a reflection of their financial status.

As we saw in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, if you’re a Wall Street bankster and can afford high-priced legal help, you have a pretty good chance of never spending a day in jail, regardless of the harm your actions caused.

Or if you’re a General Motors executive who covered up faulty ignition switches that killed more than 100 people, you have a special status that lets you stay out of jail.

But if you’re poor and come up against the legal system, you may face an uphill battle keeping your freedom, even for offenses that wouldn’t normally carry jail terms.

That was one of the conclusions from a yearlong study by the New Hampshire chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union that found some people in the state still get sent to jail for not being able to pay their fines.

Data collected by the ACLU for 2013 showed that 289 defendants who owed fines were jailed in nine of the state’s 10 counties. That’s a drop in the bucket of the 83,000 cases that involved fines that year, but too bad if you were one of the unfortunate ones.

The report, "Debtors’ Prisons in New Hampshire," points out there is a process under which judges can rightfully jail people who can afford to pay their fines but willfully fail to do so.

That process, according to the study, is sometimes disregarded in the name of judicial expediency.

For instance, one mother of two who was convicted of shoplifting – not usually an offense that lands one behind bars – was jailed when she failed to complete the remaining two-thirds of the community service hours to which she was initially sentenced.

According to the transcript, the lawyer in the underlying case, Ryan Guptil, told the court that "there was a significant fire in her home about a month and a half ago."

To which the judge, Michael Bamberger, responded, "How did that stop her from doing the community service?"

When Guptil asked that counsel be appointed and the woman be afforded a hearing before being hauled off to jail, Bamberger told him that, "If the public defenders are going to take the position that folks who don’t do community service are entitled to hearings, there will be no more community service."

It may be inconvenient for judges, but that’s what the law requires.

Ironically, the ACLU study found the state spent twice as much to jail people at the rate of $50 per day than the fines themselves were worth.

The good news in the report is that it’s not a widespread problem. The bad news is that it’s not an isolated one, either.

The principle involved is equal protection under the law. As the study points out, "jailing individuals who are unable to pay fines and fees assessed against them is unconstitutional because this practice treats the poor (who cannot pay fines and therefore will be jailed) differently from more affluent members of society (who can pay fines and will not be jailed.)"

If judges want to end the practice of sentencing people to community service, that’s their prerogative, but one of the recommendations from the ACLU is that fines bear some relation to a person’s ability to pay. We don’t think that’s unreasonable. In fact, they do it in many other countries.

Not that two wrongs make a right, but fair is fair. If justice is relative for those at the top of the economic ladder, then it should be for people at the bottom, too.

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